Finucane & Me: My Life with Marian

By John Clarke

Marian Finucane was a trailblazing broadcaster, the first to champion women's issues on air, and respected for her fairness, empathy and doggedness. One of a small group of Irish people known simply by their first name, the nation mourned when she died suddenly, aged 69, in January 2020.
But John Clarke, Marian's widower, doesn't use her moniker – instead, he calls her 'Finucane'. It highlights the gap between the woman so many felt they knew and the woman he loved – the real Marian – who was by turns curious, fiery, emotional, stubborn, charming and endlessly excited by life.
When John and Marian first got together, they promised each other that they'd never be boring. What ensued was forty years of conversation and thousands of miles travelled. Finucane & Me is an unexpected love story: the story of two people who 'made a pact for madness'; the story of a never-ending search for meaning; the story of two people who lived life to its fullest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Nov 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9780717195534

John Clarke

John Clarke has been involved in anti-poverty struggles since he helped to form a union of unemployed workers in London, Ontario, in 1983. He is a founding member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and worked as one of its organizers from 1990 to 2019. He is currently the Packer Visitor in Social Justice at York University in Toronto.

Book preview

‘There are two types of people in this world; the Givers and the Takers – make the

call…’

Anon

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’

George Santayana

Dearest Marian,

The world you and I knew before you died has changed immeasurably.

We didn’t know it, of course, but Covid-19 was already creeping through humanity in our last few weeks together.

What followed – the cocooning, the absences, the denial of a hug – seems particularly surreal in light of your timing. All the rituals of death and mourning were scrambled and left many of us even further adrift. It made it harder to grieve, to find distractions, and so was all the more conducive to introspection.

My few broken words about us at your funeral made kind people curious about how I was faring without you.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m grand.’

‘No, really – how are you?’

Our old friends Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan talked me into making a documentary on grief and loss, and it seemed appropriate for me to do it for all those faithful companions of yours, your listeners throughout your broadcasting years, rather than leave it to commentators from the sidelines.

My stumbling attempts to define grief seemed to resonate with viewers, although my efforts sounded feeble and futile to me. You of all people knew about a depth of grief so visceral it defies description.

When I agreed to write this book about our time together, I thought I might focus on the joys, the travels, the companionship on the great adventure. I wanted to write about what brought us together, what kept us together, the pact of madness that drove us to explore the world and made it so exciting and interesting for us both.

But how do you write a story about a long life and complex humanity without talking about guilt, loss, challenges, tragedy and human flaws? How do you give it a meaning without some kind of philosophical framework?

I am conscious of the tendency to deify the dead and that includes you, my love. You were as flawed as any other human being, as you would be the first to acknowledge. As readers will discover, you were one of the most tolerant women on earth, but your privacy and certain aspects of our lives were sacrosanct. So while I will try to deal honestly with our lives together, I do that while guarding your and other loved ones’ privacy as carefully as I can.

A major part of my problem in writing this book is that I cannot or do not think sequentially, which compounds the challenge for everyone around me. You would certainly have something tart to say about that.

You and I spent many hours wondering at our purpose on earth, musing on the randomness of life and death and choice. I see no sequence in life, only randomness, which may be partly responsible for what has landed me in trouble from time to time. I seek memories that seem meaningless to others; I look for order in places where there is none. It’s what makes the journey exciting but also, alas, so predictable.

As well as struggling to find order and a timeline of some kind, the process of delving into 86 years of a rackety, restless life and trying to make sense of it involves a reckoning. It’s been a painful process at times. And memory, as I also discovered in this process, is a terribly fickle friend for ageing and other reasons that will emerge.

You and I were a fairly disorganised, haphazard pair. Remembering dates and names has been a challenge, which won’t surprise you at all. Incidents I breezily ascribed to the 1960s turn out to have happened in the 1970s – I think. Important family events I had assigned to the 1980s actually happened in the 1990s. Some highly diverting stories had to be abandoned when, on closer examination, they turned out to lack any internal coherence due to geographical or timeline conflicts – and that’s being kind to myself.

We kept no aides-mémoires in the form of diaries and were careless with documents. The fact that you and I moved house at least half a dozen times meant many of the few documents we kept ended up decaying in a damp garage.

As for

photographs … well,

people seem very surprised that in 40 years we never took a photograph. In these days of instant multiple pictures it seems like a bizarre anomaly. But why would we take photographs when we were so busy being there? We knew what we saw. That was enough.

The upshot of it all is that, in spite of exhaustive efforts, I remain an unreliable narrator – above all because your remarkable memory, my love, is lost to me.

You would have been the firm corrective on the margins, reminding me of details, taking issue with my interpretations and my philosophy, as I like to call it.

Sometimes I look back at old RTÉ footage and I remember the kitchen conferences before a show, an interview, a discussion. I view clips from an old and modern Ireland that you had a hand in transforming, scenes from Africa where we did a lot of crying – and laughing – with Friends in Ireland stalwarts and did some good along the way.

The answer to the kind people’s questions about my life without you is that the earth continues to spin and so do I. I’ve moved on in the sense that I did not remain stranded in a cloud of mourning. But I never stop talking to you.

For a man of 86 with various ailments and a near lifetime of bad habits, my body has been surprisingly resilient, although I think it’s catching up on me, finally. The COPD is noticeable now; I need more blood transfusions and seem to have more allergies. The cataracts seriously impinge on my reading. Since you left, I’ve had cancer treatment and heart problems.

I get tired more easily and I fight it, of course – you would expect no less.

As someone said, old age is not for wimps.

But I can tell you straight, my love. It was a wonderful, wonderful life.

John

Finucane

& Me

ONE

The First Journey

The public saw only a sliver of the Marian iceberg. She was quite deliberate about that. But there are whole parts of her that even I didn’t know. We were as close as any couple can be; we soldiered in all sorts of weird places and did all sorts of daft things.

‘But do we really know each other?’ I asked her one day.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Have you ever sat there looking at the person you’ve been sharing your life with for 40 years, sharing your grief, laughter, love, hate and everything else, and thought, Who the fuck is this? How did I get here?

*

What did I see first? A tall blonde woman in red trousers. Gabby. Laughing. Surprising. A rare sight coming down the steps of Stephenson Gibney & Associates, the brash young architectural partnership shaking up the capital city, when women made up just a handful of the profession.

She was on a year’s placement from Bolton Street’s School of Architecture. Arthur Gibney was her boss and my closest friend. It was around half past five on a sunny summer’s evening, and he and I had arranged to have a drink in the Crookit Bawbee, where Mr Charlie Haughey featured among Gibney’s regular drinking companions.

We said hello. ‘Are you waiting for the quare fella?’ she asked. I said yes, and we chatted about her views on the demolition of old city buildings, while also noting that she was doing her internship with a company profitably designing their replacements.

‘So you’re joining the enemy?’

‘I want to learn how to be a good architect,’ she said gravely.

Would she like a drink, I asked. We were all heading for the pub, as it happened, so she and I went ahead together and talked about books, which morphed into a heated debate about Hemingway and his book on bullfighting. A discussion ensued about blood sports, which was satisfactory for neither party, until we were joined by Arthur, with a crowd from the firm, and the drinks started.

At around eight o’clock she said she had to go. I offered to walk her to the door, then to the corner of Baggot Street, from where she went on about her business, wherever she was going.

Gibney asked if I liked her.

‘She’s a very interesting woman,’ I said. Anyone who can argue about Hemingway is always interesting.

‘She’s very distant,’ said Gibney. Which was exactly what I found interesting about her. She was reserved. A bit standoffish.

Just … different.

Her exit from the pub was a pattern I would come to recognise on other occasions. She always seemed to have ‘appointments’. I think she had her escape route built in before she went anywhere.

Gibney, myself and some others had a regular Friday lunch to which some ladies from his office were usually invited. I asked him if he would invite ‘yer wan’. He rolled his eyes.

‘I don’t care if she’s cold,’ I said. ‘I like her anyhow.’

So a couple of days later, Marian duly arrived down with three other women. Lunch started at half past twelve. By the time the food arrived, around two or three, there were half a dozen bottles on the table.

Marian? She laughed and kept laughing till the tears ran down her face. Nobody could figure out why she was laughing. She thought she had arrived at some kind of Mad Hatter’s tea party. She had never seen such quantities of drink being consumed in the middle of the day nor heard anything like the nonsense that was being spouted.

Lunch finished up around five, whereupon Gibney, the master of ceremonies, would decree that it was time for liqueurs – sambuca (we didn’t set fire to them – that was for tourists) or limoncello, perhaps.

This was followed by another decree – ‘a proper drink in a proper pub’ – whereupon we would proceed to a pub and drink two pints. Following those, Gibney would say that they were nice pints, but we must have a man’s drink. This heralded the whiskey course. By now on the Friday routine, it would be around ten o’clock and it always seemed a bit premature to go home. The next stop would be a nightclub, where closing time was in the early hours.

Marian and I sat together at one end of a table at that first Friday lunch. We attempted to elevate the conversation to a slightly higher plane. Completely futile. Naturally we ended up in a nightclub – a terrible kip in Leeson Street.

By then I had learned a few things about her. I knew that she was 20 years old, that she had read every known book on God’s earth and was a keen debater. But she also seemed quite innocent. Sheltered, convent educated, a daily Mass-goer when she lived at home, raised through the sieve of devout Catholicism and respectability by a teacher and a garda with proper social consciences. Good people who lived good lives and earned their pensions, kept their noses clean and worked regular hours in the service of family, church and community.

I was her polar opposite. I had a wife and three young sons at home. And I was 14 years older than her. A hard-living, hard-drinking atheist of 34, wheeling and dealing in property and the rag trade. I’m not too sure what Marian made of me. But there was a torrent of chemistry between us.

After a couple of meetings, I realised she was the only person I ever wanted to see. We shared an insatiable curiosity about the wider world and how it worked. A diligent student debater and activist, she was far too busy studying, saving the planet and marching in protests against apartheid and the ruination of Georgian Dublin. Debating seemed to take up an inordinate amount of her time.

What she heard in me, I think, was an alternative voice. I accepted almost none of the tenets she had been brought up with. She was a voracious reader who routinely parked up her little Fiat Uno opposite Eason’s on O’Connell Street every Saturday, bought a book and spent the afternoon reading it there in the car or on Howth Head. Her knowledge of American and Russian literature suggested it wasn’t the Sacred Heart Messenger she was buying.

In her efforts to navigate a path through a stifling society, she possibly viewed me as her number-one specimen, someone who agreed with absolutely nothing she had heard or seen, someone from another world, a world that worked much more in the grey. That may have been the attraction. I don’t know. We never analysed it because we didn’t have to. Within a few weeks we had fallen in love.

*

It was easy enough to bump into one another discreetly. Gibney, being our social organiser, ordained a fitness regime for the group at one point and this involved tennis in Shankill, where my friend and mentor, Sam Sherling, had a farm. Marian and her friend would come out to join us and Sam would open a bottle of whiskey and we would all sit around discussing philosophy, Plato and the meaning of Zen, or so we liked to think. There was some tennis played, it’s fair to say, and Sam was a very serious man in terms of the human comedy. He was also running a lucrative international scrap-metal business.

Thirty years older than me, he had been my mentor since I was 20. The Sherlings were no ordinary family. Fleeing the pogroms, Sam’s father, a devout Ashkenazi Jew, walked from Russia to Cork and sold needles, thread and scissors door to door before setting up a scrap-metal business in the 1920s. It was a whole other world, one barely visible from Ireland unless you were prepared to look.

What did I learn from Sam Sherling? I’m not sure. Sam was a very negative man in many ways, and I could be negative too about life. But Sam was negative in that way that nothing really matters, everything changes, life is for living now because tomorrow we may all be dead or in a gas chamber or expelled in a pogrom. Finucane felt he was a dangerous mentor because he was an anarchist. It’s true that he was more than a little odd. I seemed to spend a lot of my time with oddities. I liked them.

All this was an eye-opener for her. She was suddenly entangled in these frenetic encounters among people who appeared to be making money in all sorts of bizarre ways, people who were totally cynical about the system and how it operated, with a complete disregard for societal and religious norms.

We had a few things in common, she and I. We had been born in Dublin, our mothers were teachers and we were big readers. Otherwise, we might as well have landed from different galaxies.

*

Like most Dubliners then, we were only a degree or two removed from rural Ireland.

My only sibling, Elizabeth, and I were fashioned from more liberal material. Sheila, our mother, born in 1904, was raised in County Longford by a woman who rolled her own cigarettes – held with a hairpin – and was living a kind of anti-clerical feminism decades before it ever hit the mainstream. Granny Cosgrove reared five daughters and two sons on a farm in Dalystown, a townland a few miles from Granard where I often spent holidays. When Dublin’s North Strand was bombed during the war, Sheila feared another attack, so we moved to Granny’s for several months since Granard was considered to be an unlikely target.

I was only four or five and frightened by the big old creaky farmhouse so was really happy to be allowed to sleep with Granny. This came with conditions. Her alarm went off at six every morning. This was a house where electricity and running water were way in the future and the toilet was a ‘long drop’ in the orchard. So, Granny’s day began by turning on her Tilley lamp, fuelled by methylated spirits, and stoking the ashes to boil water for the tea.

Then she would turn on the crackly radio – the kind run on old batteries that had to be taken